Finished Grinding and Sanding Bowls Stumps

Today I finished grinding the foot-ring stumps of the bottom of my steel bowl. I have the foot-ring on the side awaiting it’s fate, I may at some point turn it in to a display stand and cut a pattern out of it to me it less chunky and industrial looking. Once the stumps were ground down Dallas gave me a sanding pad for the grinder and I set to smoothing out the rough grinding wheel marks, this also trued it up a lot, adding the patches to the bowls contour so that no fine filing will be needed.

So now it looks a lot more bowl shaped with the end form visible. Where the stumps where are now silvery patches in the orange paint smooth to the touch but with an interesting visible sanded texture that you cant really feel. After it has been sand blasted I may go over the outside surface to get this effect again – it looks good.

Next is sand blasting off the remainder of the think orange paint. After that it will be time to enamel the inner surface. Its now time to start getting my designs down out of my head onto paper. Before I commit a design to my larger steel bowl I shall carry out a few sample ideas with a number of copper test pieces. These are relatively straight forward to make. 0.8 gauge copper sheet in a doming block to produce some small copper bowls and then ensuring they are clean with rubbing alcohol they are enamelled with test designs.